


Another Suitcase in Another Hall

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Cylons, F/M, Love, Secret Marriage, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-02
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-05-24 06:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6144370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love is no consolation if it can't change anything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another Suitcase in Another Hall

There is a shadow standing outlined in his doorway, waiting for him to take notice.

"Hello, Bill," a soft voice finally says.

Adama's head jerks up from the Colonial scripture he's been examining for the upcoming battle. He turns his head to look at the shadow, who won't quite resolve and become real, because he knows the voice can't belong to the woman Adama desperately wants it to belong to.

_"Stay with me." And a racking cough._

He put his hands atop hers to still their trembling.

"Come with me."

It can't be her.

Laura Roslin is on the Galactica, fighting for her people to the very last. Dying on her feet, too, slowly but surely, while Adama, who loved her, who loves her, who married her because she'd asked him, is here.

Among the Cylon. First among his people, doing what God had intended him to do from the beginning. Before the woman waiting for him to speak had so confused the matter that it had taken him nearly five years to return to his own.

"You're a projection," Adama says regretfully, turning up the light and noticing with a pang the gaunt lines of her face, the dark shadows beneath her eyes, the sweat beading on her forehead. "She's not here. Laura would never come here."

"Maybe, maybe not. Things have gotten complicated, haven't they?" his wife asks, leaned against the doorway with folded arms. She looks so much like Laura that he can't be sure that it's not her. "Tell me why, Bill."

That's not his name anymore, and she knows it. Bill Adama had been perilously close to human, and he's not human.

"Why what?" Adama asks.

"You know Galactica better than anyone," Laura says. "Why haven't you taken us out? Why aren't we dead yet? Why did you let humanity get so close to Earth?"

Adama stands up and takes two steps toward Laura. She looks real, his imperfectly, absurdly strong wife, who might have been leaning against the doorway because it takes too much energy to stand. She's lost weight, and the shine on her face and the gleam in her eyes are bright and sickly.

Are the glitter of death, a candle burning at both ends.

"You confuse matters," he says finally. Projection or reality, there's no point to withholding the truth. "Every time I've tried to let you kill yourself on one of your absurd missions, I find I can't. On New Caprica, if I'd just stayed away...but I thought of you in that incredible red dress, dragging me into the hills and laughing. And I couldn't let you go."

He doesn't tell her how he saw her in his dreams, lying dead and pale in the dust, the red dress marred with red blood. Laura doesn't need to know how many times Bill has imagined her dead in his own mind.

_"So you love me enough to save me, but not my people," her voice said roughly, cracked with tears and drugs and pain._

"Your people aren't worth your life," he replied. "I've lived with them, Laura. I've seen them at their worst."

"You killed billions. What the hells do you think you're going to see? You've seen them do amazing things. Your son...yes, he is your son...he fought for democracy. Against a father he loved," she said, one tear spilling onto her cheek. "Why did you even bother to ask?"

"Why did you run, Bill?" Laura or something like her asks relentlessly. "Why did you do it?"

"I needed to return to my people and to my God," Adama says stiffly, wondering if she might be the genuine article, Laura Roslin in the flesh. Her arms are held just right, and the sharpness...the pragmatic, icy sharpness that he admires and hates in her...but why come now? And who would dare let her leave?

"Wait six months. Maybe a year," she says between slow, jagged breaths. "I would have been dead, and you could have ended them without a fight."

"Ask the question, Laura," Bill spits at her, anger tinged with a flood of almost-love, almost-desire. This was her, Laura driving him up a wall with her demands, it was so like her that it hurt.

"You want us to win," Laura says softly.

"I want you to win," Adama says, neither confirming nor denying.

"Yes, you do," says Laura. "You could have had me for the last year. You could have had everything if you'd just waited for me to die. Why do that? You love me, but you love them more."

He doesn't have to ask who she means. His ship. His people. His family whom he misses like a heartbeat.

_"I don't know," Bill said, feeling foolish and shifting a bit, trying not to meet Laura's eyes. "I had to."_

"What if I kill you right now?" Laura asked, voice trembling as she stared him into looking up. "You're a Cylon, Admiral. I should kill you where you stand."

"I'd download," Bill said.

"Even as one of the final five?" she asked, tilting her head. "So maybe I don't kill you. Maybe I knock you out, and explain it to Cottle, Tigh, and Lee. Maybe we make you a living vegetable instead."

Their eyes had met, rage and despair showing in the feverish glitter of unshed tears in Laura's eyes and splotches of red on her cheeks.

"So do it," he said. "You're capable of it, Madam President."

"Maybe it isn't my will I follow. Maybe it's God's," Adama says, wanting to reach out and trace the curve of her face.

"So God wants you to fail?" Laura asks scornfully. "That's frakking crap and you know it, Bill."

"Who knows what God wants?" Adama replies.

"Oh, my good soldier," she says with acid tenderness. If she wasn't so clearly a projection, if she wasn't so fragile that he could break her with a touch, he'd get up at this moment and kiss her. "I mean that, you know. You always fight according to your rules of engagement, wise or not. You had to give us a chance, because that's fair by your lights."

"And by yours?" Adama asks.

"I would have waited for you to die and used the sympathy from your death to lead humanity into a final trap," Laura says, cold and honest. "It would be simpler. Cleaner. And I would have had you and love the entire time."

"Everybody wins, right?" Bill asks, unable to hide his distaste of such a fundamentally dishonest plan.

"Frakking right," Laura says roughly.

To his surprise, Bill laughs heartily.

"Gods, I miss you," he says. "I miss how you've always been the ruthless one. The real fighter."

She looks at him, the shadow of death on her face and a luminous glow in her eyes. And then, very carefully, Laura Roslin takes two steps forward before stumbling.

Bill Adama reaches out to catch her.

She's solid, caught in his grasp and looking at him with love and pain and _need,_ searing need that makes him draw her closer, right into his arms to rest against him.

_"If I could, I would," Laura said, looking at him for a long, starving moment before turning away. "Go."_

He waited for a full minute, but she wouldn't speak or look at him.

"I'm sorry," he said, putting his hand on hers before fleeing his ship like a coward. Like Gaius Baltar might have.

He couldn't bear to see what might have been in her gaze after his last apology.

"It's you," he says.

Laura smiles, and she's so light, Bill's heart aches. "We could spare me," she confesses. "I'll be dead in three months."

Three months. No. Not enough time. Too much time.

"What are you doing here?" he hisses at her, wanting to shout at her for being stupid enough to infiltrate a basestar in her condition. Wanting to scream at Zarek, Cottle, Baltar, Lee...whoever let her go.

Knowing they couldn't have stopped her, even if they tried.

"Come back with me," Laura whispers. "I'm going to win, Bill. Humanity will find Earth, and they will survive. Come home."

She can't be serious -- she's outmanned, outgunned, and dying -- but Adama knows she means every word and she will fight to the death and beyond to make it so.

"Who says you're leaving?" he asks harshly, feeling his heart pound. "Who says I won't keep you here?"

"Who says I didn't think of that?" Laura asks, looking up at him with guarded thoughts. "Come home, Bill."

Her voice cracks on the last word, and his stomach twists in agony.

" _This_ is my home," Bill says. "I'm Adama, the first of my people."

"You're my husband," she answers, eyes boring into him. "And you're miserable here. Come home. Take me home. Let me have someone to face the gods with. Gods know what they'll have to say to me."

It almost breaks him. He holds her tighter.

"Any god who would damn you for what you've done is a frakking bastard," Bill says. "You're stronger than all of us. The best of them. Even now."

"Not this time," Laura says. "I don't have a grand plan. I just want you to be with me when I die. I'm tired, Bill. I'm so tired. Either take me home or kill me, but I can't keep fighting you..."

She puts her head on his shoulder, and Bill is lost. He strokes Laura's back carefully, feeling her back rise and fall.

It was brave of her, or foolhardy, to come all this way, believing he wouldn't break her neck and end the pain for both of them.

But that's Laura, the true believer, the fighter who can't stop. She knows him, she knows that he wants to pick her up and take her home right the frak now...

He lifts her up and carries her over to his bed. She looks at him carefully, nervous but trusting.

And Bill puts a thumb against her windpipe, adding just enough pressure to garner a gasp from Laura.

"Are you sure?" he asks, anger adding an edge to his voice.

"I am," Laura says in her most serene and terrible voice. He could crush her larynx without trying; he's stronger than she knows. She's very still, eyes fixed on him. "Do it."

She's so sure of him. That he'll do what she says, even if that means she dies.

It doesn't take very long to finish it.

She's light in his arms when he lifts her up and carries her out of his room. No one comments on the tears in his arms as he carries her to the flight deck.

No one would dare.

Adama recognizes Athena when he sees her, waiting. There's a look of horror in her eyes when she seems Laura, limp in his arms, but there's secret gratitude, too.

Unwarranted gratitude, but Athena can't know that.

"Take her home," Adama says to the girl and former subordinate.

"But she's..." and Athena stumbles on the word.

"She's not dead," he says flatly. "Take her home. Tell her to stay there."

"Understood," Athena says, a sudden shudder passing through her. "She's not going to like it, sir."

"I know," Bill says, touching Laura's face for the last time. "Get her off my ship before I change my mind and break her neck."

Athena nods, and does what he asks.

And then they're both gone, Adama's wife and one of the few people he'd trusted despite himself. He watches them go, wondering if he should have ended it now, before Laura fought back again.

But there's not time, really.

Three months. Three months is not very long.

For any of them.

He can wait three months. Just three months and he can finish this. He can wait that long. God can wait that long.

Any God who can't is as evil as the one who's condemned Laura to her fate, condemned her to fight to save her people in the face of impossible odds, loving her enemy.

Three months.

He touches his head to his hands and tries to pray. But Adama, first among the Cylon, can't bring himself to pray for Laura Roslin's death, no matter how many problems it would solve.

The scriptures are wrong -- love cannot bear all things or believe all things. For Adama, love has only made him unable to finish his work for God, without making him able to give up who he is and come home to humanity, giving up his people and God's plan.

Home to where he knows she will be waiting, with a faith that could remove mountains.

It's not enough.


End file.
